Phonebooth Review: Small Business VoIP

Full Review:2015-05-13 12:55:23Phonebooth is a VoIP company that's part of Broadband.com, one of the larger and fastest-growing telecommunications companies in the U.S. There's a decidedly different feel to Phonebooth, perhaps best epitomized by their icon featuring a red British telephone box. Phonebooth is unique in the business VoIP landscape because of its pricing: The per-user cost of $20/month is the same whether you have two employees or fifty. Many VoIP companies require a high number participants for pricing that low, so we find it refreshing to find a pricing policy like this.

There are no setup or activation fees with Phonebooth, and the pricing is all-inclusive. After you've purchased your VoIP compatible phones, either from Phonebooth or from another company, all you'll need to pay is your flat monthly fee, which is based on how many users you have. One exception to this is if your business requires more than two separate phone numbers. Two free phone numbers are included in your plan, but beyond that, you'll pay one dollar per extra phone number each month. We should also note that while Phonebooth does charge for more than two phone numbers, the service includes unlimited extensions for free.

Features

Phonebooth offers a fairly full feature set, with no additional charges for standard features such as unlimited domestic calling, two phone numbers, conference calling, voicemail to email transcription, call-forwarding and call-hunting, and an auto-attendant for answering and routing calls. Just about the only thing Phonebooth doesn't have is faxing capabilities. If you want to be able to fax you'll either need to hold on to an analog line, or subscribe to an Internet fax service, such as myFax.

Because VoIP service sends your calls over the Internet, Phonebooth requires IP-based phones that turn voice into data and vice versa. Phonebooth offers a number of options, from a Yealink T-20 at $105.00 up to the Polycom SoundStation IP 7000 for $925. Most customers will find that the $105 Yealink T-20 will be fine for their needs. Of course if you already have VoIP-enabled phones from another vendor, you can use those.

Support

Technical support is offered 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The support agents are based in the United States and support is offered via phone or in an online forum. The online representative we chatted with was very friendly. There's also a substantial help-section on their website.

With its simplified pricing of $20/month per user, and no setup-fees, we think that Phonebooth is worth a look, particularly for smaller organizations. The lack of fax may be disappointing for some, but the rest of the feature set is otherwise robust.

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